23 maj 2012

EU Parliament Majority Expresses Support for ACTA

The ACTA related vote in the European Parliament took place earlier today

A majority in the European Parliament just voted in favor of a resolution saying that it

”regrets that China has not taken part in the negotiations on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA)”

Although this is not quite the same as voting yes to the ACTA agreement as such, it is a very alarming signal that there may in fact be a majority to say yes to ACTA in the European Parliament, despite all statements about ”ACTA being dead” that have been circulating in the press and elsewhere.

The vote was a separate vote on a part of a bigger resolution with the title ”EU and China: Unbalanced Trade?”. The mention of ACTA is in Article 15 of the resolution.

That the whole resolution was adopted is one thing, since it contained lots of other things, and members of the European Parliament (MEPs) may have liked the other things enough to vote in favor of the resolution for that reason.

But the alarming thing is that the separate vote on the ACTA sentence was carried. (I of course voted against.)

This is a wake-up call for all net activists who have gotten the impression that we have already won ACTA. This is absolutely not true. The battle is still going on, and after today’s vote I feel very concerned indeed.

Next week a number of committees in the European Parliament will be voting on opinions on ACTA. These votes are not decisive in themselves, but will be steps on the way towards the eventual acceptance or rejection of ACTA.

Does it still surprise someone that MEPs payed from taxpayers’ money seem to be ready to vote against the interests of the taxpayers, for interests of corporations, nemely tobacco industry? Against all statistics, ressearch and stuff? Must be that the others pay more.

Since 2007 i’ve been following this and since then i’ve been telling people and spreading information as much as possible and doing as much as possible. Thank you for letting us know about this Christian. Without this kind of information it wouldn’t be possible to fight this thing which stinks as hell, like most these things to. Like you said, it’s not exactly a ‘yes’ vote to this but still gives chills up my spine, not to mention the anger build up inside my chest. Forums, blogs, emails, writing to MEP’s, etc, etc… that’s what i’ve been doing since 2007. Since 2008 i’ve been very much, let’s say, active about this and since 2010… well… i think you can guess the rest. Here, in Portugal, they signed it without any participation from the public (no wonder) or even the national assembly. The political parties that have been most vocal about this in the last few months are the communist party (Partido Comunista Português – PCP), the left block (Bloco de Esquerda – BE) and the greens (Os Verdes), in that order. Social media doesn’t talk about this, at least not that i could see and what i did see didn’t say much (no wonder, again). The only one that replied to this date were the communists (PCP) and the others, i sure hope they are reading this or read what i’ve been sending them. As for a pirate party here, well, we do have a movement (MPPP – Movimento Partido Pirata Português – partidopiratapt.eu) but they don’t have enough signatures to become a political force nor i think there is enough people trying to do it. Anyway, i could go on forever but i can’t fill up the comment box with this. Sorry about that. Once again, thank you for the information you’ve been posting. The ones that are not in english i’ve been using Google Translate since i can’t ‘capice’ a thing about Swedish.

Hello, thank you for posting this information. I’ve been gathering information on the position of UK MEPs for ORG – do you know how they voted? Was this a roll-call vote? Are the details available online?

It was not a roll call vote, so there is no way to find out how individual members voted. (Which I think is a disgrace, all votes ought to be roll call votes so that citizens can check what their MEPs are doing, but that’s another issue.)

Anyway, in this case the important thing is how MEPs will vote in the different committees next week, and in the final vote in plenary scheduled for July, so focus on that when you are contacting MEPs.

[…] in another European Parliament vote recently, a majority of the Europarliament appeared to vote in favor of ACTA. So the worst mistake we can make right now is to think that this is all over, that ACTA is […]